Jakit

Vaccination Nation

The big lies of our time:

There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Obama is a socialist, meat and dairy are bad for your health, real estate will keep going up forever, players just work our more nowadays and.... vaccines are the best way to fight disease.

Regarding that last one, I received this in an email from Organic Bytes and I thought that it summed up the swine flu situation quite well:

Despite 30,000 emails from Organic Bytes readers, and mounting global concern, government bureaucrats and the corporate media continue to gloss over the undeniable fact that massive factory pig and poultry farms are incubating deadly viruses that could cause catastrophic mutations in the so far mild Swine Flu Epidemic (H1N1/09). At the same time, media and health officials downplay the importance of safe and proven organic and holistic precautions - strengthening our immune systems with healthy organic food, medicinal herbs, homeopathic remedies, lifestyle changes, and stress reduction - while cheerleading for the likely ineffectual and hazardous Big Pharma vaccines currently being rushed to market.

It's not always true, of course, but often you can find the lie by following the money trail.

Our Inner Ecosystem

I've long been touting the benefits of eating raw foods, especially milk, which, when I started drinking it, was the single best thing I ever did for my health. However, what is perhaps even more essential for us to consume are fermented foods; most preferably, in my case, sauerkraut. Like raw milk, this is a food that was a standard part of the human diet until recently.

Long before refrigeration, people had to figure out a way to store vegetables during the cold seasons when, obviously, these foods were not growing in the ground. Over time, they realized that if they went through a certain process and stored them properly, the vegetables would ferment and keep for several months. This way, they could get their essential nutrients even in the dead of winter. The added benefit (unbeknownst, I'm sure, at the time) that came with eating fermented foods was the addition of naturally-occurring pro-biotics to the diet.

Previously, I had assumed that people had consumed fermented foods for around 10,000 years; about the same length of time that human civilization has existed. However, I just read an article that suggested the amount of time was, perhaps, longer; much, much longer. It turns out that we've, probably, been eating fermented foods for, approximately, 1.5 million years. For those keeping score at home, that's before humans learned to tame fire.

What this means is that for over a million years humans have been developing an ecosystem within our guts that is dependent upon the ingestion of friendly bacteria. Yet, sadly and ignorantly, and like the the natural world around us, modern man has destroyed our inner ecosystem.

This is because over the last 50-100 years folks have stopped eating fermented foods. On the rare occasion that people still do eat sauerkraut, pickles, or even beer, they are almost always pasteurized; in other words, to increase shelf-life, they've been heated to a point in which all the good bacteria have been killed off, rendering them fermented foods in name only.

I'm not an expert in this subject by any stretch of the imagination, but it stands to reason that when you, suddenly and drastically, change the human diet from what it has been for a million a half years you're likely going to have repercussions. Who knows what modern ailments stem from this alteration; everything from poor-digestion, acne and allergies to asthma, depression and anxiety have been connected to the devastation we've incurred upon our own guts.

It's worth the nine bucks, or so, to go over to your local Whole Foods and purchase some raw sauerkraut.

A Raw Story

Here's an interesting tale.

Throughout human history, people drank raw milk. They didn't choose to have it raw, it just was that way, so that's how they drank it. And all was well as the people enjoyed the many health benefits that this tasty beverage contained.

But then, a little over a hundred years ago, the industrial revolution hit our food supply. No longer were cows grazing in pastures and eating grass. Now they were forced into factories, fed cheap diets and left to walk around in their own manure. Consequently, diseases were rampant in the cows and these found their way into the milk. Millions of people died.

As a result, the dairy industry began to cook, or pasteurize, their milk. This eliminated many of the health benefits of dairy foods, but it also killed the harmful pathogens and so it was safer than the status quo. As an added benefit (and one that motivates the business side of all this) pasteurized milk has a longer shelf life.

But new problems arose as doctors slowly learned the effects of cooking dairy foods; lactose intolerance exists only as a reaction to pasteurized milk, many feel that allergies and asthma are related to it also, as well as countless digestive ailments.

So what to do? Well, the common sense thing is to do what should have been done 100 years ago, and that is to attack the root of the problem; clean up the dairy farms. If you don't have dirty cows, you don't have dirty raw milk and you don't need to cook it.

Sadly, instead of going to the root, people are just extending the branches of the problem and prescribing medication to cure all the health issues associated with pasteurized milk. All that is doing is exposing one hole to cover up another. It's only a matter of years (or months) before we learn that there are new diseases caused by the new medications.

But that's how our current corporate/business controlled system works. Whereas before, all you had was a raw dairy farm making money, now you have a dairy farm, a pasteurizer and a pharmaceutical company shoveling it in. And yet we, as a people, are only getting sicker.

Break the chain.

The Bio Alternative

So I'm reading about biodiesel on WikiPedia and I come across this line:

Currently, biodiesel is more expensive to produce than petroleum diesel, which appears to be the primary factor keeping it from being in more widespread use.

I wonder what they mean by "more expensive."

It might be cheaper to extract oil from the ground than it is to process vegetable oil, but the writers of that article obviously haven't taken into account some of the auxiliary costs associated with petroleum.

For instance, it's currently costing the American Taxpayers two hundred billion dollars to wage a war in Iraq in order to ensure the cheap and non-interrupted flow of oil. I can't imagine any wars being waged over vegetable farms.

Then there's the trillions of dollars we're losing because our Government is focusing on Imperialistic endeavours instead of creating a sound and vibrant economy. How do you estimate the cost of someone's job?

Lastly, we need to ask ourselves what the true price of global warming and other environmental dangers is? Can you even put a dollar amount on those forces?

I'm not sure if BioDiesel is the best alternative to Petroleum, but I do think we need to frame the debate properly.

New Urbanism

Not too long ago, folks would go to the local theater to watch a new movie. The studios made a lot of money from tickets sales and all was well. But then with the increase in technology, the studios learned there was much more money to be made by selling folks on the idea of watching movies at home. After all, a trip to the theater costs the price of a ticket and maybe some popcorn. But watching movies at home is a TV, a DVD player and some DVDs at the very least; maybe add in a TIVO, home theater and a fancy new recliner.

By convincing people to stay at home, businesses greatly increase the amount of money they can make. When a community goes to a cafe to socialize and drink coffee, hundreds of people share a few tables over time. When a community stays at home to drink coffee and socializes on the internet, hundreds of people buy hundreds of tables (and computers.) It's the difference between selling a few things to be shared by a community and selling many things to be used individually.

One of the sad things here is that the community uses those tables constantly, whereas the same tables in someone's huge home go largely unused. It's wasteful at best, indulgent at worst.

But perhaps the bigger problem here is that people have learned, or more likely been taught, to dislike and even fear the community. That's the resason for the SUV. Look at the Cadillac Escalade, so mean and tough, designed to protect the occupant from the violent outside world.

And so we Americans drive our tank-like cars to our huge gated-homes in the burbs and live in solitude only communicating with each other and the outside world through the safety of digital devices. And should that saftey zone be upset, by terrorists nonetheless, well hell, let's chuck our civil liberties and morality and slaughter people half way across the world.

Because, well, it's all in the name of good business and America was built on good business.

This is why I so desire the urban experience, especially that which exists in Europe. In urban places, people are still forced to interact and thus their understanding of each other is higher. Spaces are small so you can't have your own pool table, you must go to the local pub to play pool. This is the way we should live, for peace and for the Earth as well.